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7/30/2019 Ruins of Modernity: The failure of revolutionary architecture in the twentieth century
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RRUINS OF MODERNITY:
THE FAILURE OF REVOLUTIONARY
ARCHITECTURE
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
TE
ursday
b 7, 2013
0 PM
LOCAT
Kimmel Ce
Room
60 Washington Sq
NYC, NY 1
CONFIRMED PANELISTS
PETER EISENMAN
REINHOLD MARTIN
JOAN OCKMAN
BERNARD TSCHUMI
& MORE
EVENT DESCRIPTION
Let us not deceive ourselves, Victor Hugo once advised, in his iconic Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Architecture is dead, and will never come to life again; it is destroyed by the power of the printedbook. Both as a discipline and a profession, architecture lagged behind the other applied arts. Even
when measures toward modernization were finally instituted, many of the most innovative,
technically reproducible designs were hived off from the realm of architecture proper as mere works
of engineering. Toward the beginning of the twentieth century, however, fresh currents of thought
arose within the field to lend architecture a new lease on life. Avant-garde architects emulated
developments that had been taking place in both the visual arts (Cubism, Futurism) and scientific
management of labor (Taylorism, psychotechnics), advocating geometric simplicity and ergonomic
efficiency in order to tear down the rigid barrier dividing art from life. Most of the mi litant members
of the architectural avant-garde sought to match in aesthetics the historical dynamism the
Industrial Revolution had introduced into society. Machine-art was born the moment that art pour
lartdied. Art is dead! Long live the machine-art of Tatlin! announced the Dadaists George Groszand John Heartfield in 1920.
The modernists project consisted in giving shape to an inseparable duality, wherein the role of
architecture was deduced as simultaneously a reflection of modern society as well as an attempt to
transform it. Amidst the tumult and chaos that shook European society from the Great War up
through the Great Depression, revolutionary architects of all countries united in opposition to the
crumbling order of bourgeois civilization, attaching themselves to radical political movements.
Forced out of Europe by fascism and subsequently out of the USSR by Stalinism, the architectural
avant-garde fled to North America. Following a second global conflagration transposed into the
postwar boom context of America with the GI Bill, Europe under the Marshall Plan, and Japan under
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McArthur the modernists now reneged on their prior commitment to spur on social change.
Abandoning what Colin Rowe had called that mishmash of millennialistic illusions, chiliastic
excitements, and quasi-Marxist fantasies, they instead accommodated themselves to the planning
agencies and bureaucratic superstructures of Fordism. European modern archi tecture came to
infiltrate the United States, largely purged of its ideological or societal content; where it became
available, not as an evident mani festation or cause of socialism, he wrote, but rather as dcor de la
viefor Greenwich, Connecticut or as a suitable veneer for the corporate activities of enlightened
capitalism. Indeed, the International Style that premiered in 1932 at MoMA under Johnson and
Hitchcocks highly selective curatorial oversight had already been stripped down to its barest formalelements. Looking to revitalize revolutionary modernism, Reyner Banham thus declared in 1962:
Even when modern architecture seemed plunged in i ts worst confusions it could still summon up a
burst of creative energy that gave the lie to the premature reports of its demise. Modern archi tecture
is dead; long live modern architecture!
Only a decade later, however, Charles Jencks calculated in his book on Post-Modern Architecture
that it was possible to date the death of Modern Architecture to a precise moment in time (July 15,
1972 at 3:32 pm, with the detonation of Yamasakis much-maligned Pruitt-Igoe complex in St.
Louis). Today it is postmodernism that appears to be aging badly. But if postmodernism, which stood
for the end of the end (Eisenman), is itself at an end, does this mean the end of the end of the
end? Just another stop along the way in an endless cycle of endings? Or perhaps another beginningof a modernist renaissance? This prospect could prove bleaker yet. In archi tecture, writes Owen
Hatherley, addressing the issue of post-postmodernism, typically postmodernist devices seem to
have entered a terminal decline, as historical eclecticism and glib ironies have been replaced by
rediscoveries of modernist forms albeit emptied of political or theoretical content. But does this
trend represent a break with postmodernism or does it merely mark the arrival of the pseudo-
modernism of contemporary architecture?
In light of these considerations, Platypus thus asks: Where does architecture stand at present, in
terms of its history? Are we still were we ever postmodern? What social and political tasks yet
remain unfulfilled, carried over from the twentieth century, in a world scattered with the ruins of
modernity? Does utopias ghost (Martin), the specter of modernism, still haunt contemporarybuilding? How can architecture be responsibly practiced today? Is revolutionary architecture even
possible?
Sammy Medina (Architizer, Platypus Affiliated Society)
Ross Wolfe (The Charnel House, Platypus Affiliated Society)